In article <1993Dec2.041535.6258@lclark.edu> bab@lclark.edu (Brian Bringardner) writes:
>Has anyone read Bruce Bawer's book "A Place at the Table?" I would
>be interested in opinions of this definitely politically incorrect
>book.
I read it last weekend, and I've been thinking about it all week. The
first thing to say is that it's a serious, thoughtful book by someone
who genuinely believes that he has the best interests of gay people
in mind. The next thing to say is that it's so full of contradictions
that it's hard to know what to make of it. The announced purpose of
the book is to demonstrate to a gay teenager that he can be a happy
conservative. (The book is addressed almost exclusively to a male
audience.) But it reads much more like a long exercise in self-justification
by a gay conservative who is having trouble holding on to the illusion
that his conservative friends really value him as a human being. The
extensive autobiographical sections are by turns painful and boring.
The book opens with the author spying a young, butch teenager eyeing
gay magazines in a bookstore. The author laments what that teenager
is going to learn about being gay from those magazines. What's
intriguing here, and what I'm still puzzling over, is that this scene
is a reenactment of the cruising that the author laments, and, moreoever,
the object of the cruising is clearly a teenager. The author expresses
a desire to recruit this teenager to his own image of gay life, though,
of course, being the upstanding citizen he is, he passes on the
opportunity. What is the author saying here? Is he deliberately
setting up this cruising scene to contrast it with the popular image
of homosexuals? Or is the irony completely lost on him? Judging
from his thorough (and surprising, given his literary credentials)
inability to appreciate irony demonstrated elsewhere in the book,
one seriously wonders what his intention is here.
The author early on develops the theme of the isolation of "subculture"
gays (I still haven't figured out whether I'm one or not; I've lived
almost all of my life in the suburbs, but I identify strongly with
the denizens of the Castro and Greenwich Village), contrasting that
with the healthfulness of living among heterosexuals. (The value
of having primarily heterosexual friends is assumed, not argued.) But
the book concludes in its most powerful scene with the painful,
public humiliation of the author and his "companion" by a heterosexual
couple they have longed believed to be among their closest friends.
In this scene, the author discovers that these people whose friendship
he values don't respect his life or his relationship at all. One
might expect that such a rejection would cause a moment's reflection
about the value of such a friendship. It might also instill in one
a little sympathy for those gays who feel the need to challenge
heterosexual "friends" from time to time, lest they too discover
in such an ugly way that their friends are just saying the right
things as best they know how. But no such sympathy is to be found
in this book; those "in your face" gays are just alienating
heterosexuals.
[As an aside, I can't imagine any gay person whose perspective hasn't
been warped by the New York Times actually calling his lover
a "companion." Here Lassie, Lassie.]
Other contradictions include repeated rantings at gay leaders in
the early 1970s for their emphasis on the right to have sex instead of
the right to marry. The author's analysis at first seems completely
ahistorical, completely ignoring the social conditions that focused
gays' activism of the period on sexual freedom, not yuppiedom. But
later, the author lets on that he is fully aware of those social
conditions, and, moreover, acknowledges that until about 10 years
ago, even he would have found the idea of gay marriage laughable.
Even leaving aside the question of the desirability of gay marriage,
the acknowledgement that the very idea of it was unthinkable 20 years ago
undermines the criticism of those who did not argue for it then.
The problem, the author asserts, is that "subculture" gays hold
themselves out as representative of all gays. But, he insists,
most gays are actually like him. (Well-to-do, white, male,
Manhattanites?) If (heterosexual) people would just realize this,
their prejudices would disappear. So anything that makes them think
that most gays are like the "subculture" gays is counterproductive.
Gay pride parades are a definite no-no, unless the participants
are wearing suits and carrying briefcases. The first problem here is
that the gays the author wants to see in a parade would never in
a million years show their faces publicly, and he acknowledges
this fact. The bigger problem is that people like him wouldn't
even be calling for a parade of suits if there weren't the parades
we have today. His book is an explicit reaction to the gay images
he sees; he has been prompted by the current images to offer his
own. Now we have two competing images, and I think that's great.
The author might wish that the relative strengths of these two
images were reversed, but at least we have those images. If it
were not for the images offered by the parade people, there would
be no images of gay people, just more silence and more private
suffering. The suits would happily have stayed in the closet.
And why is it that "subculture" gays are vilified for purporting
to represent gay people? (Do they actually so purport?) At the
same time that they (we?) are criticized for this, they (we?) are
also criticized for failing to recognize that the religious right
does not represent Christianity. But the religious right claims
to represent Christianity at least as much as "subculture" gays
have ever claimed to represent gays. In fact, a group of
evangelicals has just named Marilyn Qualye "Christian Woman of
the Year."
And about irony. The author describes with contempt Joan Jett Black's
campaign for the presidency in 1992, in which she declared something
to the effect of "When all those people voted for Other, I knew
they were voting for me because I'm the most Other Ms. Thang here."
But we don't want to be seen as the Other, the author laments. In
its context, JJB's statement is not only uproarioulsy funny, but
makes exactly that point about Otherness. But because it's coming
from a black drag queen, it couldn't possibly be that deep.
I could say more, and I could be more organized. There are lots
of things going on in that book, some of them illuminating, but
many of them reflecting the author's still evolving understanding
of his place as a gay individual.